No. 188: Dowling sound bites, a Feinstein first and what really makes a woman go ape

Guess who's following Roma Downey on Twitter?

February 5, 2017

TG it’s Friday: A great end of the week, everybody. The 16th Amendment was ratified on this day in 1913, giving the federal government the right to collect income taxes without having to share them with the states. It hit about 1 percent of Americans.

Yikes: There were 56 brackets by 1918.

Also, it’s the day the music died. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P Big Bopper Richardson were killed in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959.

+ “What I think is going to happen in Washington is they’re going to nibble around the edges of Obamacare and give us something that’s 80 or 90 percent the same and they’ll call it Trump Care and tell us it’s the best thing we’ve ever seen.”

+ “You can be affected by outside events, but you don’t have to be controlled by them. You can’t sit there and become catatonic by what they’re doing in Washington. We have a plan and we’ll execute it. We may have to adapt it a bit, but that’s what you do, you adapt and move forward.”

+ “There has been a lot of consolidation among hospitals and you will see a lot more of it. Because if you don’t have scale, you can’t do any of the things you really want to do. Scale is really, really important. We’re in (merger) talks with hospitals in Westchester and Connecticut and New Jersey and Philadelphia as well as on Long Island. We’re going to get bigger.”

+ “We’ve invested heavily in ambulatory care centers, in getting treatment to people outside hospitals, and the result is our hospitals are totally packed, the highest in-patient volume in a decade, because as you expand your services you meet more people who need care they can only get in a hospital. No one predicted that.”

+ “You’ve got to disrupt yourself, because if you don’t, someone else is going to do it for you. You don’t want to be the health care equivalent of a taxi operator in Manhattan and wake up one day to an Uber.”

Closed quarters: Bridgeworks, the hipster Long Beach co-working space, is expanding the concept – and its footprint – to welcome business people who might actually enjoy a little privacy.

Making rounds: Jean Cacciabaudo, the former chief of cardiology at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, has been appointed medical directorof Peconic Bay Medical Center.

Doubling down: Wholesale changes to the Affordable Care Act may loom, but a Long Island software startup has gone all-in on a potentially enormous healthcare vertical that hinges on Obamacare’s basic principles.

Hold the hen-dog: Text messaging is an effective tool for reducing heavy drinking in adults who want to cut back, Feinstein Institute researchers have found.

No. 9559991: Judy Wieber now has USPTO cover for her Automated Text Response System, the brains behind a pair of apps that can now move from slouch to scamper.

No bumps: ClearMotion, which started out trying to create electricity from auto shock absorbers and is now exploring “digital chassis” technology, has landed a $100 million investment from JP Morgan and Qualcomm.

A welcome change: The United States uses 1,800 tons of disposable diapers daily. Imagine if they were biodegradable.